Governance and Democracy within Safe Society

I’ve been referenced here a couple of times so will briefly weigh in … firstly, the topic(s) are very broad - so broad, I don’t know where to begin or end - I could, if I had the desire, write a tome (literally) on these topics … I won’t do that, because I have a strong preference for the use of my time … which, oddly enough, is really the crux of why society often ends up in the structures that it does.

What I mean by that is that even though we might like things to be one way or another ideally, we, due to our Individual “time preferences”, will end up doing things that don’t actually involve some of our many individual ideals.

For example, a DAO structure is an interesting idea and agreeable to some of my own ideals, however achieving a DAO, complete with our particular specifications (not the off-the-shelf Ethereum code) places a hard limit on how quickly we could get the ball rolling as it’s outside of my personal knowledge area and I think, currently (because it’s novel), is outside the personal knowledge area of most people - someday that may not be the case, but until then the value of those who know these things is high and so their time-preference is going to the highest bidder … which is not going to be me. Given I do know a thing or three about founding organizations (just not DAO’s), then it makes the most sense for me, for the forseeable future, to use that knowledge toward making the world a better place (according to my time-preferences).

Because of time-preferences I also favor small focused groups that share similar time-preferences - sometimes these groups shrink to the size of one individual (again because of individual time-preferences) and hence there is no democracy … but there is efficiency, and so long as the overall group is happy to lend their support, then it is a sort-of democracy.

At the end of the day, IMO, getting all people to agree to voting on particular issues, only tends to make people anxious and frustrated - anxious because they will have to vote on something in which they are not an expert and frustrated because they don’t ‘prefer’ to put the time and energy into studying the prerequisites for the vote. Thus I’m strongly in favor of delegation, over democracy - particularly where the check on power is funding. i.e. if you don’t like it, don’t fund it.

Well those are my three bits. I don’t want to have a long discussion on this, so I may not respond to later comments - I’m a busy guy and this topic is only marginally of interest to me. Hopefully I’ve helped, at least a bit, and not inflamed or confused.

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Hey, that’s great @TylerAbeoJordan. I really have only positive feelings about your initiative and think it’s utterly important that people use their skills, so that’s absolutely great you’re going with that path. I don’t think you need to answer for anything written here :slight_smile:
I also agree with many of the things you say (touched lightly on that in first post here).

Regardless of alll that, these topics are very interesting imo, and however busy I am, that interest makes it rewarding to explore these subjects further, especially as I see DAOs as a realistic solution, eventually. These various topics will always be important matters both within the context of SAFE and outside of it.

But I won’t be surprised if this discussion doesn’t take off in this very topic right now :smile: Many and huge subjects, which makes it very hard to maintain.

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The CEO of Equifax Mr. Smith what a great name to be annymonous, said this week that all the data will have to be controlled by the individual in the future. Same for health records, so the ball is bouncing right into your court and I don’t think they are going to let a russian backed cyber platform do the contract. So Iam still learning the topic and reading about how much these large outfits are dropping the ball. Watch C-Span Oct 4 Dept of Digital Commerce in the house of representatives this past week!

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Great to see someone posting something like this as i’m constantly having ideas about how we could create a better world system with Maidsafe in mind for a lot of it. I think this is one of the biggest problems that needs to be solved. I’m not sure 1 vault 1 vote is a good idea though, because how do you stop people running multiple vaults? I have an idea for how to achieve this but been meaning to post it in @dirvine 's Proof-of-unique-human post a while back. In fact i started to write it but didn’t have enough time to finish it. If we can determine proof-of-unique human i believe it opens us up to be able to create the best and most fairest system we can imagine, not to mention it can help solve a lot if not all of the spam we get on the net.

Basically I believe if we are to have a system that verifies each person is unique we need to have trusted people that are already recognised on the network to do leg work to check they are a unique human. This can then be done with a trusted device to test someone’s DNA, finger print or retina. Once the details have been acquired they can be uploaded to the network which checks they are not already registered (this information can be known only to the network to prevent big brother). If they are unique they can be given a unique token to be able to access the network and create an account. This can just be like having a token on the bitcoin network with you owning the private key to it and transferred to a new address created by the user each time they have to verify they are unique. As this persons trust level goes up they can also become a person that helps verify new people on the network. You could even have to have multiple trusted users to verify someone.

I know this method would slow down adoption, but it would speed up exponentially over time as more trusted users join the network.

Thanks for the like @happybeing but i was in the middle of a big edit when you liked it

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Thanks for the heads up - have read the edit and you keep the like :wink:

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Retina is probably safer than DNA because our world is littered with people’s DNA. Pick some up here and there, and feed to the device…

But, I wonder how this would be achieved. A recording device that connects to network, and reads retina, and authenticates you with it…
It would have to be a damn near unhackable thing.

The DNA test would be done by at least one trusted user already recognised on the system. I’d propose doing DNA, finger prints, retina and a photo upload. If say one trusted user verifies the person they would need at least one other randomly selected trusted user to meet and do the same tests. This way it makes it harder to cheat or influence / bribe one of the trusted users. The devices that do the testing would have to be recognised devices trusted by everyone on the system and wouldn’t have to connect to the network… they could show the readout of the test in letters/numbers and display a QR code to scan and be added to the system. Once the new user has been verified they wouldn’t have to use their retina to log in because any of that data could be stolen and used to trick the system to log in. They’d have to be a unique token given to the person which is un-hackable like a bitcoin on a trezor.

Also the trusted users doing the leg work could be paid in newly created coins of the network for adding value to the system.

You could also potentially add voice recognition to add another layer of security to the log in.

If for whatever reason the persons log in token was hacked and stolen they would have to alert the network and get re-verified.

what if that user is on the other side of the globe? …? (and if you could re-start the verification process you could do it as many times as necessary to end up with the verificator of your choice O.o … once you have a significant percentage of users in your control everything can go pretty fast)

plus … how would you check they didn’t already register as someone else? Oo …

i guess with contact lenses / pictures of eyes / generated face pictures of eyes presented a scanner software mimicing the “official scanner” (in the end it must present the network some data … so maybe you could just present the network some random data matching the size of the expected data stream … with some check sums or stuff) you could quickly generate a massive amount of identities … and the network can only verify someone already registered …not that this new one is registering with a fake identity …

Unless you are one of the small %age of people who have at least 2 DNA patterns. Highlighted in one court case where the mother was deemed not to be the mother of the child she birthed.

After a horrific (for the mother) court case anther DNA test was done using a different part of her body and lo-and-behold it showed she was the mother of the child she birthed.

And this is the basis for the black market getting highly restricted goods. Set up a “trusted” contact.

No for something like this there is no “trusted” contact system that will work.

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Well if you wanted to be a person that verifies people you’d have to declare your country of residence, another thing that could only be known by the network.

There are obviously many ways to do this, and the concept will need to be played around with and tested to find the best method, but for example: if you lost your ID token and log in, you’d maybe have to wait a certain amount of time before you can re-register and maybe have to pay a fee.

I’m sure there are ways around it to make it not beneficial to keep trying to register. Also if a person turns out to be fake the person(s) that verified them could lose their trust level or some kind of punishment. Basically there needs to be a lot of disincentive to cheat.

If we use as many ways to verify someone as possible: say facial recognition, passport, driving license, birth certificate, photo’s of when younger, retina, finger prints, voice recognition, etc… (whichever turns out to be the hardest to fake) then them details will be on the network which will instantly know if someone is trying to register twice.

If DNA turns out to not be the best or easiest way then we can choose many other ways to verify the person. Facial recognition, passport, driving license, birth certificate, photo’s of when younger, retina, finger prints, voice recognition, etc

No not yet, but there wasn’t a trusted Trezor before bitcoin was invented. And if you meant user not device then that trust is decided by the network or other users as you do more things that are deemed good for the network.

So great you collect this info then how do you verify that the person doing whatever is the actual owner of that biometric data. Do you have to have this “trusted person” along beside that person when the operation or voting is being done so that you can be sure the bio-metric being tested is from the person doing the operation or voting. Then how do you verify the “trusted person” is actually the trusted person you think they are? Welcome to the black market of trusted persons.

ALL bio-metric data can be duplicated and fool any readers that is not physically checked by proven people. The black market laughs at the trusted person idea. Why do you think that any secured area requires multiple checks and have trained guards at each check point. Something you cannot do for world wide usage of something like SAFE. You would require many times more people checking the bio readings than the people doing it.

Have a look at the “proof of unique human” topic and just by the length of it you will realise how much discussions there is on bio testing.

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My thought about proof of identity yesterday:

We tend to see this in absolutes - I know you are @Sonder because you have shown me a validated ID. We like the certainty, but things are hardly that certain really. It’s just easier for us if we can disregard the possibility that this is not 100% true.

But we rarely actually need 100% certainty. Our aim is often not really to know the real world identity but to ensure a certain level of reliability in a given context. For example, I want enough confidence that you will do what you say (ship a package, turn up for a date etc). We want to be able to trust something in order to avoid some negative consequence (not getting what we paid for, being stood up and feeling unwanted etc).

This is obvious, but why am I pointing it out? Well identity is one of the ways we’ve learned we can achieve these aims. Not because of identity itself, but because if identity can be tracked (by Amazon, by a social group, by us as an individual) we can:

  • choose not to repeat our negative experience with someone who has let us down
  • give everyone an incentive to honour their commitments

It is identity that enables this. Without it, somebody could endlessly behave ‘badly’ and there would be no way to avoid dealing with them. This can be one of the downsides of anonymity - behaviour without responsibility.

Again, not rocket science. But my point is that it is the interaction that matters here, and finding a way of limiting the probability that some infraction will have a negative consequence is what we are trying to achieve. And for this we hardly ever need 100% certainty over identity - what we need is enough certainty in relation to the gravity of the negative consequence of each particular interaction.

This is why you employ a solicitor to do a house purchase, but why you are happy to give a credit card to a website when buying a replacement phone battery (sorry iPhone owners, that is a thing :wink:).

So, in my long winded way, I’m suggesting that we can overcome the difficulty of 100% proof of identity, by er… not trying to do it. Instead, we can provide a more granular kind of identity, or perhaps reliability / trustworthiness instead.

What occurs to me is that we do it the way we’ve always done it - socially, a bit like a Web of trust. So if the risk is low, I accept you at face value, take a risk. If I need more reassurance, I will probe the ‘Web’ more (look at your profile, maybe ask you a question), or perhaps only deal with you if I can find two or three others who have reported you as reliable for a similar level of risk. And so on… the more risk I wish to avoid, the more I will look for in terms of reputation, and more fool me if I skip this and get caught out.

Notice that I don’t need to know who you are for this, only that you - or rather that your SAFE public ID - has a good reputation for this kind of transaction. I want some history that I can trust. There will always be risk, but building in this way means that for most transactions we can ensure risk is kept at an acceptable level without requiring 100% certainty of who somebody is, or even that it is just one person. The reputation lives with the SAFE ID, and a good reputation has value, so is worth protecting, and not worth throwing away to steal £5 from somebody who was hoping we would send them a phone battery.

I know I’ve moved away from trying to solve the ‘who is this’ question, but I think it’s worth figuring out when that’s really needed in different contexts, and looking for alternatives that may be much easier to achieve where it is not vital. Real world identity has its uses, so we can work out what they are, and what other things can be handled in other ways - by reputation systems attached to SAFE public ID for example.

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HI Neo,

Thanks for the reply and I welcome all debate on this, but please read everything I wrote before replying so I don’t have to re-type things again.

If you looked above you will see that I mentioned once a person has been verified by a trusted person on the network they can be given some kind of unique token which will be attached to their details that were verified and uploaded to the system.

So this person can then just log in each time to their account and may need to do a digital signature to prove it is them.

I also mentioned further up that I was going to post this is David’s Proof-of-unique-human post, but didn’t get around to it, so i am very well away of that debate.

For me, only having a person verify somebody is unique is the only way we can get close to a 100% method to get proof-of-unique-human. Any other way that means a person does it on their own can easily be cheated.

Once a person is on the system I believe we can incentivise work that is very good for society and even allocate funds to areas that everyone agrees is valuable to many.

I must admit these are not my all my own ideas. I have been heavily inspired by a book called A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All: The Future Belongs to Work That Is Meaningful

Here’s the link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1517160960/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1517160960&linkCode=as2&tag=charleshughsm-20&linkId=UIIRVX6FXFXLDSAV

I still don’t understand how you can stop someone from being 100 people. I could be verified in my local area then visit a neighboring area and be verified again and so on. If I could do it so too could the black market do it more with forged papers etc. Then that black market could sell the accounts to whomever wants to manipulate.

So for example if I we met and I took a photo of your face and your finger prints I could upload that to the network and the system would have a record of everyone’s face and finger prints. If your finger prints and face were already on the system you would not be permitted another account.

This information could only be known to the decentralized network to prevent any single person from having access to all that data.

Thanks for the reply Happybeing,

I understand what you say and I kind of agree on some level. The other option I’ve played with is that a person’s trust grows over time as they interact with others and do things on the system; from this we can have good belief they are a real person. This method could possibly work well and we could maybe even give access to parts of the system for free if a person reaches a certain trust level because they have given so much value.

I think a lot of thought should be done on this method as it may turn out to be the best way

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This still assumes the ideal situation and not one where people are trying to subvert it. I have not yet seen anything that doesn’t allow me to subvert and have multiple personalities. If I can do it, just think of organized people who plant their own “trusted people” which then makes subversion real easy and widespread.

Any how I leave this for others to discuss now since I am just being negative now.

I think your points are valid… up to a point :slight_smile:. I come back though to what I said about it not needing to be perfect, depending on the use / context. Pretty much anything can be subverted, but any system can still be fit for purpose even with holes. So make it not worth the effort for each particular use / context and we’re ok, so long as people are capable of making use of the systems appropriately (e.g. different levels and costs of verification etc.). For some things I may want to fly to Australia and meet you personally, for others a phone call, or check you out with friends or a trust service, for others check a SAFE Profile and scores.

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So as long as I have somebodies fingerprints and picture of their face. I can not only use them as a false identity but also stop them from getting an account, so they cant say “that is not me”.
Yes I dont see anything wrong with that.